Associated Departments and Centers

Departments and Programs

Our faculty and students have strong ties to several other departments and programs within the University, including:

Goergen Institute for Data Science

The Goergen Institute for Data Science is focused on the concepts, methods, and applications for extracting meaning from big data—it has become one of the emerging disciplines of the 21st century. Rochester researchers are using data science to further their work in health analytics, cognitive science, and artificial development, and to develop new methods, tools, and infrastructures.

Our National Science Foundation Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (NRT-DESE) award, Graduate Training in Data-Enabled Research into Human Behavior and its Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms, provides cross-training for graduate students in Computer Science, Brain & Cognitive Science, and Data Science.

Computer Science

The Department of Computer Science has 20 full-time faculty and about 45 graduate students. Its programs are particularly strong in the areas of computer vision and robotics, knowledge representation and natural language understanding, systems software for parallel computing, and the theory of computation. It enjoys strong collaborative contacts with faculty in several other departments, and has a major involvement in the cognitive sciences at the University.

Neuroscience Graduate Program

The Neuroscience Graduate Program offers an outstanding opportunity for graduate training in an exceptionally interactive and collaborative environment at a world class research institution. Our mission is to prepare the next generation of creative, independent neuroscientists by providing academic instruction, research experience and active mentoring. Our faculty body is remarkably diverse, representing many departments and centers from the School of Medicine and the adjacent School of Arts, Sciences and Engineering. Faculty research interests span all major themes in contemporary neuroscience from cellular to systems and basic science to translational approaches, and utilize a gamut of state of the art techniques.

Department of Neuroscience

The Department of Neuroscience within the School of Medicine and Dentistry, maintains strong commitments to research as well as to graduate, medical, and undergraduate education. Over thirty faculty with primary and secondary appointments in the department are actively engaged in research on the structure and function of the nervous system across a variety of levels of inquiry. Areas of interest cover a broad spectrum, with a strong emphasis on the neurobiology of sensory-motor systems, neuro-engineering and computational neuroscience, and also including cell signaling and transmission, development and aging, neurobiology of disease, learning and plasticity.

Del Monte Neuroscience Institute

The Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience a national leader in neuroscience research. With a team-based science approach - faculty, postdocs, and students collaborate at the bench to innovate, discover, and progress our understanding of brain.

Schmitt Program on Integrative Brain Research

The The Schmitt Program on Integrative Neuroscience (SPIN) is a campus-wide initiative to promote our understanding of the nervous system and its disorders. The Program emphasizes interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to novel and creative research and training that uniquely exploit talents from multiple laboratories across traditional institutional boundaries.

Psychology

The Department of Psychology has 17 full-time faculty and over 40 graduate students. Training and research opportunities are available through its Clinical, Developmental, and Social Psychology programs. With its focus on the study of behaviors, feelings, and thoughts, with dedicated focus on the interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, and biological nature, course, antecedents, and sequelae of behavior, Psychology faculty and students collaborate on several projects related to cognition and neuroscience.

Linguistics

The Department of Linguistics operates in close cooperation with the Center for Language Sciences (CLS), which serves as the focus of a distinguished interdisciplinary community with research and teaching interests in natural language. Faculty within the Department of Linguistics have expertise in syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. The linguistics faculty actively participate in research and training in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. In addition, they play a central role in teaching and advising students of linguistics and the language sciences from the following PhD programs: computer science, brain and cognitive sciences, and philosophy.

Music Cognition at Eastman/UR

Music Cognition at Eastman/UR is an interdisciplinary field concerned with applying the experimental, computational, and neurological methods of cognitive science to musical issues and problems—is an active area of research at Rochester that unites faculty and students from the Eastman School of Music with BCS through symposia held four times yearly, cross-listed music cognition courses, interdepartmental dissertation committees, and collaborative research that spans the two disciplines. These departments are also founding members of the Music and Sound Initiative, which sponsors interdisciplinary academic programs, courses, and research projects.

Research Centers

Center for Language Sciences

The Center for Language Sciences supports interdisciplinary research in natural language through colloquia, support for graduate students and sponsorship of topical workshops on topics related psycholinguistics, especially language processing and language acquisition, linguistics, and computational linguistics.

Center for Visual Science

The Center for Visual Science brings together 29 research laboratories throughout the University of Rochester that employ many approaches including optics, physiology, computation, and psychophysics to elucidate the mechanisms of vision.

Center for Advanced Brain Imaging & Neurophysiology (CABIN)

The University of Rochester Center for Advanced Brain Imaging & Neurophysiology (UR CABIN) is a multimodal imaging facility that supports human and preclinical imaging research. Providing researchers with different methods of study CABIN supports a wide range of scientific discoveries – from basic to clinical neuroscience.

Rochester Chapter of Society for Neuroscience (SFN)

Rochester has an impressively strong neuroscience community. At the University of Rochester alone, neuroscientists are spread across two campuses (College Campus and Medical Center), at least six major departments, as well as two to three major graduate and undergraduate training programs. A large component of our students and faculty are members of SFN, some of them very active within the national organization. Our local SFN Chapter aims to create a greater sense of unity by bringing students, staff and faculty together with the singular purpose of advancing our effectiveness as a scientific community through neuroscience education, dissemination and research.